BY PAUL DAVIES AND DEREK JEFFERS
STRASBOURG, France - More than 50,000 demonstrators took to the streets here March 29 to protest the fascist politics of the National Front (FN). It was the largest demonstration ever held against the National Front and the largest action in Strasbourg since the end of World War II.

The fascist party held its convention in Strasbourg, hot on the heels of its recent electoral victory in Vitrolles, a suburb of Marseilles. Its candidate won the election for mayor in that city, taking a majority of all votes cast for the first time. The National Front has also won mayoral elections in three other cities.

"I'm here because [FN leader Jean-Marie] Le Pen not only targets immigrants, but also wants to drive women back into the home and blames young people for the crisis," explained Monique Melo, who is unemployed and came from Narbonne 600 miles away. She had also recently traveled to Paris to participate in actions in defense of immigrants without legal status, known as the Sans Papiers (Without Papers), who are fighting for their right to stay in France.

The demonstrators came from cities all over France. The French daily Le Monde estimates that over a half of the demonstrators were under 25 years old. Some also came from Germany, Belgium, Holland, and the United Kingdom. Many marched in contingents organized by antifascist coalitions or in contingents of political parties. There were few union banners. Some of the demonstrators had marched earlier in an action of 100,000 in Paris to protest against the newly adopted "Debré law," which restricts the rights of immigrants. A week before the Strasbourg action 10,000 demonstrated against the FN in Marseilles and a similar number turned out to protest at St. Etienne. According to the French daily Liberation, "for the last four months, not a single leader of the far right party has gone out into the provinces without taking with him a large number of protesters."

The Strasbourg demonstration had been built in the preceding week by major capitalist dailies like Le Monde. Leaders of political parties marched at the front of the demonstration, including Lionel Jospin of the Socialist Party and Robert Hue of the Communist Party. The only person who spoke briefly following the demonstration was Socialist Party mayor of Strasbourg, Catherine Trautmann. She had previously backed the decision to send 2,000 extra riot cops to the city to police the demonstration. Trautmann rejected a request from a petition of 17,000 signatures that she ban the National Front from meeting in Strasbourg.

Following the demonstration several workers at the GEC- Alsthom transformer factory outside Paris eagerly sought out a workmate who participated in the demonstration. One worker, Gerard Mahe, commented, "Did you see the number of police there? I think they're the only political party in France that is protected like that."

The action was opposed by the ruling RPR/UDF coalition government, who held their own small protest against the National Front, which only 100 people attended.

Prior to the action students had scaled the cathedral walls and tossed sheafs of burning paper from its' roof, symbolizing the burning of the local Synagogue during the German occupation of Alsace Lorraine in World War II. Throughout the demonstration there were many expressions of French nationalism and French flags were carried by several marchers.

Expressions of French nationalism
One banner exclaimed, "They won't get Alsace Lorraine again," referring to the Nazi occupation of the city. Strasbourg is in Alsace Lorraine, which was not only occupied as was the rest of France, but was also incorporated back into Germany for four years during the war and its citizens forced to serve in the German army. Following World War I in 1919, Paris annexed Alsace Lorraine from Germany, as the victorious imperialist powers sought to dismantle German economic and military strength, in their own favor.

Some of the protesters who spoke to reporters from the Militant said the recent growth of the National Front was a result of people in rural areas voting for the "simple proposals" that the fascists put forward to "complex problems." This reflects a common view promoted by bourgeois political commentators that there is a growing "Le Penization" of working people. Melo said Le Pen "uses racism as a means to attract people, because everyone is a little bit racist."

Cecile Valleix, who is 24 years old and came from Paris to the demonstration, expressed a different opinion. "The National Front has been growing because the other parties are not very credible. I don't think the FN is credible, but it does answer peoples' fears. The other parties tend to avoid the problems. People end up voting for the FN because it pretends to have solutions for unemployment," Valleix said. "Are all the people who vote for the FN hard-core racists? I don't think so. There are several things that can be done. First you have to explain to people that Le Pen is lying, that he has no real answers to their problems. But at the same time you need to propose an alternative."

Unemployment in France has reached 12.8% of the workforce. The victory of striking truck drivers in November to reduce the retirement age has inspired a series of smaller labor actions around the country. In Rouen, striking bus drivers were able to win a pledge by the company to employ 80 more workers and the workweek was shortened from 38 to 34 hours over three years.

Le Pen campaigns to deport immigrants as a "solution" to unemployment.

During the coach ride from Paris to the action in Strasbourg, leaders of the Manifesto antifascist group tried to organize a discussion to promote their policies. Marco Hormazabal argued against attempts to ban the FN and called for "unity of the left" to defeat Le Pen. He argued that the road forward was to organize to register young people to vote in the forthcoming elections.

Capitalist parties shift to right
The National Front convention took place in the context of a political polarization in France that includes the ongoing resistance by workers to capitalist austerity measures and defensive strikes, and a shift to the right by the major capitalist parties - including those on the left. The government has used a December subway bombing to relaunch its attack on democratic rights through the "Vigipirate" program. Some 1,800 heavily armed soldiers are part of this operation along with cops. They patrol cities around the country, routinely interrogating Arab and Black youth in railway and subway stations. In the week prior to the demonstration, the parliament gave its final approval to the anti-immigrant Debré law, letting police keep the passports of so-called illegal immigrants.

The French Communist Party has given political backing to the anti-immigrant campaign. At the CP's congress last December, it called for "genuinely effective action against ... illegal immigration."

The French rulers' austerity drive is accompanied by an increasingly aggressive drive toward war. French imperialism has led calls for foreign intervention into Albania and Zaire in recent weeks. It is trying to use its military capacities and its influence in its former colonies to assert itself against its rivals in Europe, and particularly its chief competitor, the United States.

In the conditions where all the main political parties continue to scapegoat immigrants for the effect of the economic crisis, the National Front is able to get a hearing from sections of the middle class and some demoralized layers of the working class. Its convention in Strasbourg was attended by 2200 delegates. They heard FN leader Bruno Megret rail against the corruption of other bourgeois politicians. "The great alternative (of the FN) must replace the little alternative," he said. "The real debate is between the political classes and the FN."

FN leaders also made a point of using the convention to draw fire away from their racist, anti-working class policies by focusing on alleged and proposed denial of their democratic rights.

The convention approved a proposal to reform the constitution to enshrine a national preference for all those citizens of French origin. During the convention Le Pen used thinly veiled anti-Semitism to complain that former French President Francois Mitterrand had attended a protest against the FN "surrounded by Israeli flags."

Feeding on the discontent with the government and in response to the upsurge in workers struggles, the National Front has adopted more anti-capitalist rhetoric and Le Pen has advocated a "third road" that is "neither socialism nor capitalism." It encourages its supporters to join trade unions and to sell its literature outside factory gates and makes nationalistic appeals for the defense of "French workers" against the evils of "world free tradism." At the convention the FN adopted proposals to raise the minimum wage, at the same time that it calls for a tax system that would hit workers the hardest, gradually abolishing income tax, while increasing the regressive value-added tax, which currently stands at 20.6 percent.

Le Pen used the FN convention to position his party to gain maximum support in the run up to its election campaign in 1998. Care was taken to present the fascist party as a "democratic and republican party." The organization's statutes were amended to describe itself as a "political formation that seeks to win votes within the framework of the institutions of the Republic." For the first time the FN also called for the banning of abortion. It also calls for restoring the death penalty. A leaflet issued by the Young Socialists at the demonstration explained; "it is not only by fighting against racism that fascism can be defeated, because fascism is rooted in capitalism." Fighting against fascism means fighting for "canceling the Third World Debt, giving immigrants the right to vote as well as full rights as citizens ... reducing the workweek to 32 hours with no cut in pay, developing affirmative action programs," the YS statement said.  
 
 
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